Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > Every copyright case that's lost by the defendents is an > example. That's the point: if you come up with the exact same > expression, then either you've copied, or there's a lack of > originality in the work to start with.
I thought I'd been following this discussion, but it seems to have branched off into a discussion of originality. Unless I'm horribly confused (which, as always, is possible) originality is absolutely irrelevant to the Sun RPC code, because work derived from it is, well, derived from it, and therefore clearly not original. (If I am confused, I'd personally appreciate a recap that would explain the connection, as I've gone back and reread the past few messages and the connection is still opaque to me.) Assuming that the reported clarification is accurate (i.e., BSD except that you can't distribute the original by itself), there are two questions to be answered: 1) Can you take a work based on the Sun RPC code and further modify it to be exactly like the Sun RPC code, and distribute that? 2) If the answer to (1) is no, is that restriction compatible with the GPL? In order for the code to be GPL compatible the answer to one of those questions must be "Yes". MHO, of course, is that the more likely yes answer is to be found from (1), as (2) is clearly false. In fact, if the answer to (1) is no, I have trouble seeing how it passes the DFSG at all. -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
